Broken Back Bolivia

After a week in La Paz I had a stinking cough and absolutely no appetite barely eating a slice of bread a day which has been good for the waist line but not for the health so it was time to leave to a new town. Last night in La Paz was meant to be an easy early night but Nick had other ideas so he got us drunk with Jaeger Bombs and we chatted the night away with Chris going to bed with the hump due to no girls chatting to him, of course Chris denied this but me and Nick knew the truth. We left La Paz first via a bus to Oruro in the morning and then via a train to Uyuni. The train transcends through the Andes and has some spectacular sights for the few hours of daylight you get on the train. I yet again have another chip on my camera lens and the buttons are not working but can not afford to buy a third one so photos will have a slight blemish.

The stress and strain of travelling for so long has started to get to me and my health with solid bowel movements being a rare treat for me and rash’s of all sorts and colours appearing on different parts of my body I envy people when they say they have been travelling for just a month as they are in that honeymoon period where you want to connect with everyone and do everything, I now feel like I can not be bothered drinking as the next day usually involves a hangover and a bout of homesickness.

Oruro is huddled on the bleak altiplano some 230km south of La Paz, the grim mining city of Oruro was once the economic powerhouse of Bolivia for much of the twentieth century due to its mineral wealth in the surrounding mountains. It’s fortunes have plummeted south over the last two decades making it a shadow of its former self thus we only spent a few hours there eating and getting ready for the train ride.

Uyuni again is set on the south Altiplano which when you get out the city is a spectacular sight, this railway town has very little to offer and when we arrived late Friday night absolutely nothing was happening with everything closed, its only usefulness is its proximity to the Salar de Uyuni (salt flats). Its streets are lined with a collection of shabby, tin-roofed houses and a semi-abandoned railway yard filled with decaying skeletons of trains. The only saving grace in this town is the minuteman pizzeria that is owned and run by a guy originally from Boston and to say the least these are the best pizzas in Bolivia if not the best I have ever tasted!

Once in Uyuni we met up with our friends who got to this town a day later than us but in the mean time I needed a haircut and since getting what can be compared to an ‘army cut’ in Arequipa due to my lack of Spanish I was very anxious about my next one. Cometh the hero of the hour…..Chris who told me that he trained to be a hairdresser before he enrolled in the police force, this was of course bull shit but still he couldn’t do any worse than what was already becoming an animal of some sorts home of hair on top of my head so I nervously agreed to let him cut my hair. To my amazement Chris did a fantastic job albeit very gay letting him do it, it did create a few laughs in the hostel with the chair put outside the towel around my neck and we even had a pink squirty spray bottle to wet my hair.

The gang all in the same hostel we booked our 3 day 4x4 tour of the salt flats and the Altiplano for 600Bs. The Salar de Uyuni covering some 9000km2 of the Altiplano west of Uyuni is by far the largest salt lake in the world. The Salar is not a lake in any conventional sense of the word though below the surface it is largely saturated by water, its uppermost layer consists of a thick, hard crust of salt, easily capable of supporting many cars. With the unbroken chains of snow-capped mountains lining the far horizon, it was easy to believe I was on another planet.

The death road gets all the attention as being a dangerous activity but truth be told more tourists die on this tour than the death road and it’s very easy to see why, as we embarked the fear levels grew and grew and I was more scared of this than the death road where I was in complete control! The tour started with the salt plains which we took a lot of kid’s toys, why you ask? Well the salt flats are flat (well they do have a slight gradient) and you can really mess around with perspective here for example you can get a picture of a friend holding another friend in his hand or in a hat or anything you want the possibilities are endless, my favourite is a picture of me holding a rubix cube with the picture looking like my friends are standing on it with me blowing them off. We also took a rubber dinosaur and we all have pictures of this massive dinosaur with the person looking like a tiny hobbit next to it. The thing that struck me about the salt flats was the brightness it could be compared to snow blindness so sunnies were a must from the outset. From here we venture through the desert in the 4x4 and with another vehicle in our group we were concerned when our guides were having a domestic in the front seat when it came to a fork in the road with it looking like we are going right then at the last second we go left cue hearts in mouths when the jeep perilously skirts onto two wheels and after that death defying act it turns out we did go the wrong way with the second jeep running parallel to us on the horizon getting further and further away. Eventually after our scenic route we meet up with the other jeep to carry on driving ‘carry on’ being the optimum phrase here! The scenery in this area is absolutely stunning with massive brown mountains, scattered vegetation, grazing llama with blue and red lagoons dotted around the area full of pink flamingos feeding around the edge oblivious to the masses of tourists arriving in many jeeps. Seeing all these wonderful places and all the different animals indigenous to each country it amazes me why people go to the same holiday every year usually Spain as there is a whole world out there to be explored, if the world was a book the people who don’t travel have only read the first page!

Carrying on with the tour on the last day we rise at 0400 leaving dressed all in winter gear as it is below freezing outside which means our jeep’s windscreen is frozen and virtually pointless so cue our driver driving like Ace Ventura with his head out the window and then a near miss head on collision that was not unlike that from Quentin Tarantino’s movie Death Proof where Kurt Russell’s character drives head on into a oncoming car but finally we get to 5000 meters above sea level and to a hot spring in the middle of nowhere where we then donned our bating suits and warmed up but after this at the altitude I found that I was seriously dehydrated and felt faint and sick but soon recovered after declining in altitude and drinking a serious amount of water. It was this journey home that got everyone’s bum hole puckered up as it seemed our driver had somewhere to be urgently so it was gun hoe the whole way hitting dips and bumps at speed with the driver swerving across the road and to me this was the most dangerous part as there are set tyre lines with no gravel but when you cross to the next set of lines you hit the piles of gravel which reduces the grip and the jeep starts to slide. To top it all off 50km from the town our driver fell asleep (micro sleep) but luckily nothing grave happened and we got home in time to enjoy another few slices of some delicious pizza before the fellowship of Bolivia broke up with most people going their own way.

So Fergal, Paul and I headed on a night bus towards Tupiza some 200km southeast of Uyuni the isolated mining town nestles in a narrow fertile valley that cuts through the harsh desert landscape with its cactus strewn badlands, deep canyons and strangely shaped rock formations and pinnacles. This town draws tourists largely because of its dramatic surrounding desert landscape which is ideal for hiking, horse riding or touring by jeep; I bet you can guess which one we didn’t want to do.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tupiza was the home of one of Bolivia’s biggest mining barons. Carlos Aramayo, his mines were rich enough to attract the attention of the infamous North American gunslingers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid, who are believed to have died in a shoot-out in the town of San Vicente some 100km to the northwest.

So with every tour in Bolivia it gets progressively more dangerous so what could beat a jeep tour with a maniac driver? A trek on horse back! If my memory serves me well I think I spent 5 minutes on a horse thanks to a girlfriend’s sister’s horse and I think I got walked around the stables and that was it so I would say I was semi-pro. On this trek we HAD to gallop at full speed, this would not have been a problem if we were told how to control and what to do in English but it was Spanish so in the first hour a girl I met previously in Fiji came off her horse and cracked her head open and split her lip, she was taken to the hospital while we had to continue with our trek. Lucky for me we met this Belgium girl who was an experienced rider and she gave me some tips and after this I felt like a real cowboy and it was just like the death road I always wanted to go faster in a gallop so it was one hand on the rains and one hand hanging out and then leaning over the horse’s head jockey style to make it go faster! One of the best times ever but what would of made it better would have been Chris Pearson trotting out on his Shetland pony as he is only 5ft nothing. The scenery was straight out of the Wild West with looming red mountains made from sand stone to cacti littering the badlands, tunnels and rivers cutting through our path which we have to cross trying to control the horse. Fergal had quite a hard time with his horse blaming it for every fault but really I think he was to blame as he was too soft with her where as me and Buttercup had this mutual respect albeit peppered with hatred. There were a few daunting moments like when at full gallop my feet would come out of the stirrups but with my amazing control over the horse I could stop her and then get the feet secured but there were times when she would veer and cross terrain that was not fit for galloping but Buttercup would just lunge over any obstacle. So I survived horseback riding and now there is nothing more too dangerous to do in Bolivia.

The next day I can assure you that I have never felt as sore as that day even after a four day trek was nothing on seven hours of horseback riding.

At the last possible moment we decided to leave Tupiza and grab a bus to Potosi which was across one of the worst roads I have ever come across and to top it off we broke down add a raging hangover and it was the worst bus ride ever! Tupiza is not the best town to go out in but we stayed up to see our flirty Dutch friend Gerda who only obliged to come out after all day and night in a jeep so our last night and possible last time we will see each other. I don’t normally get vexed about bad food but we went to a restaurant recommended by the Lonely Planet but when the food came out cold that is when an establishment has failed royally in my eyes and to top that off he wouldn’t give us a discount saying that we are the only people who have ever complained.

Potosi is set on a desolate windswept plain amid barren mountains at 4100m above sea level it is the highest city in the world and it is difficult to see at first why this city was built in this isolated location, the answer lies in Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain), the conical peak that rises domineeringly above the city is quite simply the richest source of silver the world has ever seen. To put it in perspective in the 16th century the population of London was 600,000 and in Potosi it was a staggering 200,000 making it the most populated area in South America. One of the main attractions here is to take a tour down the mine and visit the miners who have awful lives with life expectancy reaching only mid 30s but it is a very dusty and claustrophobic environment and with that I have decided it is not something that I am interested in seeing. Over three centuries it is estimated that the death toll runs as high as nine million making the mines of Potosi a central factor in the demographic collapse that swept the Andes under Spanish rule.

So if I didn’t go to the mine what did I do in Potosi? Well I went to the highest stadium in the world to see Real Potosi vs. The Strongest. I also chilled out on my own a luxury that is rare these days in one of the squares with the sun beating on me reading my book about a man who swam up the Amazon river eating pasties and drinking fresh orange juice squeezed by ladies.

From Potosi I got a bus to Sucre where I decided I would take some Spanish lessons and after 20 hours I can tell you that it has not helped a bit. The only good thing is that I am slowly declining in altitude which means the weather is getting better and the effort needed to walk up a flight of steps is reduced dramatically. Sucre is a very pretty town with the centre consisting of many churches and whitewashed buildings that are required to be painted every year. I have not been to any of the tourist traps here instead I have chosen to relax and watch the world go buy in the square reading trying to swat away the numerous beggars or children trying to polish my white flip flops with black shoe polish!

Santa Cruz next

Sorry no photos again thanks to the wonderful Bolivian Interenet